LyonsPrice (9 page)

An unwilling smile tried to crawl across Lyon’s lips. “Yeah,
I wouldn’t put it past him.”

He headed for the door, but paused as he reached it and
looked over his shoulder. His gaze settled on the sheet-wrapped form on the
bed. She was facing the other way, so he couldn’t see her face, but she hadn’t
moved, her arm still outstretched where he’d left it.

She’d betrayed them. Betrayed him. A fresh wave
of…something…gripped his chest. He turned, leaving the cabin before he could
weaken any further over a damn human.

Chapter Seven

Lyon and his anger leaving the room lifted the crushing
pressure weighing down on Samara and allowed her to breathe again. The gray on
the edges of her vision receded and the world came back into focus. Blinking,
she felt her heart rate drop down a notch. Apprehension still swirled through
her veins as Cael dropped the used anesthetic shot into a biohazard bag, but
didn’t seal it.

Wetting her lips, Samara plucked up the courage to speak.
“What are you going to do?”

Far from the smiling, joking woman of earlier, Cael’s
expression was blank and shuttered. As forbidding as the grim reaper himself.
She shivered as the woman picked up Lyon’s discarded blade and fixed her with a
steely look.

“I’m going to assume you’re intelligent enough to realize
that this implant isn’t the contraceptive one you claim it is,” she said as she
settled the tip of the blade against Samara’s thigh, as calm as though carving
up someone’s leg was an everyday occurrence. Maybe it was, those horror stories
about cyborgs had to have come from somewhere.

“I’m also going to give you the benefit of the doubt and
believe you’re telling the truth when you say that’s what you thought it was.”
Cael’s voice was hard. As though she really didn’t want to give Samara even
that much. “It’s not. It’s a sub-dermal tracking device. I would guess your
ship has been trailing us since we took you aboard.”

Samara closed her eyes, her head dropping back against the
bedclothes.

“They called all the nurses in. Said the brand of implant we
all had was under recall. I thought it was odd at the time…I mean, what are the
chances we all had the same brand of implant? No medication suits everyone like
that…”

She pressed her lips in to a thin line as she made the
connections. She’d been played like a freaking concert violin. What an idiot!
They’d called them all in and fitted the entire nursing staff with tracking
devices.

“But why?”

She turned a questioning look on Cael, as though the other
woman had all the answers. She certainly knew more about what was going on than
Samara did. Why would her own people put a tracker in her? Unless…she paled,
feeling sick.

“They wanted one of us to…” She couldn’t say it. Couldn’t
admit she’d fallen for the trap, hook, line and sinker. Couldn’t admit that
she’d allowed herself to
become
the trap for Lyon and his people.

“Cut it out. Now. In fact, give me that knife. I’ll do it,”
she ordered, struggling to sit up. Her leg felt weird, the muscles at the front
of her thigh refusing to cooperate.

Cael shook her head, holding the blade out of reach.

“Not a chance, sweetheart. You’d be cutting the wrong way to
reach it, and if I let you bleed out, Lyon will have my head on a platter. Now
lie down and don’t move. I’d like to do this quickly. I hate cleaning up
blood.”

Samara held her breath as Cael put the wicked-looking blade
against the pale skin of her thigh again and pressed. The skin parted, a bead
of blood welling up into a bright red ball. Christmas decorations, she thought
absently. It looked like a Christmas bauble or a holly berry. All red, shiny
perfection.

It grew too large and rolled down the side of her thigh.
Cael paused and looked at her. If Samara had thought the female cyborg looked
scary before, then the look in her eyes right then was downright terrifying.

“Lyon isn’t just my boss, he’s family. My father, my brother…call
him what you want. He was there when they pulled me out my tank and he’s been
there ever since.” Her voice was like ice, the words a chill warning in the
small room. “You hurt him and I’ll not only make you wish to God you’d never
been born, you’ll wish your parents had never even met. Do I make myself
clear?”

Samara swallowed, and then winced at the loudness of the
sound in the silent room.

“I don’t mean to…I don’t want to hurt him. Or any of you.
I-I can’t believe they did this. I’d like to throttle the captain. I thought he
was an okay guy, but this? Uh-uh.”

She shook her head, deliberately not looking as Cael pressed
the knife into her leg and trying not to think about what would happen if she
pushed too much. She was a cyborg, right? Had all those computers and whatnot
in her brain. So she’d know just how deep to go, wouldn’t she?

“Let’s just say he’s off my Christmas card list. And he can
forget being invited to my birthday party.”

“The worst you can do is striking someone off your card
list?” Cael’s lips quirked as she worked. Just a little, but Samara caught it.

“Well, no, but drugging your CO insensible and duct-taping
him naked to the helm tends to be frowned upon in the Fleet.”

Cael snorted in laughter, her lips curving as she ferreted
under the skin of Samara’s leg for the tracker. She was glad she couldn’t feel
it at the moment, but she was sure as soon as that shot wore off, it was going
to hurt like a bitch.

“Yeah. I’m sure it is.” She looked up, mischief in her eyes.
“But it’s an idea for certain smart-mouthed men around here. Ah, here we are.
Meet our little friend, the standard Combined Fleet personnel tracking
implant.”

She held up a small, plastic cylinder similar in size and
shape to the contraceptive devices Samara was used to dealing with. The only
difference was a small indentation at one end, where a tiny green light flashed
intermittently. Cael crushed that end in her strong fingers and let it drop to
the bedclothes, leaving a bloody smear.

“Transmission interrupted, that’ll bring them running. Let’s
get you patched up before the shit hits the fan.”

* * * * *

Cael slipped back into the main cabin with a near silent
tread. Didn’t help when they could all register her heartbeat, but Lyon knew
she wasn’t trying to be stealthy. She had a natural grace that was unusual in a
Cancer class and one their group often took for granted.

“All done?”

His query was short and brusque, as normal. Only the lying
little witch in his bed seemed to be able to bring out the conversationalist in
him.

“Yeah, it was a new one. Not seen it before. They’re getting
clever.” She slid into the empty copilot’s seat and buckled herself into the
harness.

Lyon’s eyebrow winged up. “Since when were you bothered
about flight safety?”

She rolled him a look as she brought the ship’s sensor
controls online. Since she could direct link with the shuttle any time she
chose, the fact that she wanted eyes on as well was telling.

The shit was about to hit the fan.

Archon. Eoin. Get your asses in here now!
he bellowed
as he vacated the pilot’s seat. Archon was the better pilot. With him and Cael
on the flight team, there wasn’t much they couldn’t outrun, outmaneuver or
full-on outfly.

“What we looking at?”

Cael’s lips compressed into a tight line for a second as she
studied the display in front of her. “We got company out here. That tracker was
short range.”

He started to buckle himself into the second row just as the
two Geminis barreled through the door, alerted by his shout. Although they
could use mental communication, all of them could block themselves off if
needed. They often did, otherwise the voices in their head could drive them
mad. Hearing, though, couldn’t be blocked, so when Lyon shouted, they came
running.

“Archon, helm. Eoin, guns. NOW!”

The twins split without a word. Eoin dived back through the
door, heading up to the gun turret, as Archon headed for the front of the
cabin.

He didn’t make it.

Something hit the side of the shuttle hard. Like the Gods
had had taken a large hammer and decided to beat the hell out of it. The metal
of the sub-frame screamed in protest as the shuttle skittered sideways and
started to spin. Archon stumbled, grabbing at the back of Lyon’s chair as he
fought against the violent movement to reach the pilot’s chair.

“Fuck it,” Cael swore. “Eoin, we got multiple targets—what
the fuck is that?”

Lyon didn’t need to be looking at the sensor readouts to
know something was seriously wrong. A fight with Fleet forces was nothing new,
even if they were massively outgunned, but the sound reverberating through the
cabin made them all pause.

It built within nanoseconds to overtake the screaming of
metal. A distinctive whine designed to send a chill down the spine of any
cyborg.

Electromagnetic pulse.

The only thing that could take down a cyborg at long-range
was an EMP and the Fleet knew it. Which meant every one of his kind was
shielded. It was a hack job, though, as they tried to stay ahead of Fleet
technology. The bastards had money and resources to throw at the problem,
whereas Lyon and his people had to rely on field data.

Field data that was hard to come by. Any cyborg unlucky
enough to get caught in an EMP was either dead, their cybernetic systems
stifling their bio-organic ones, or en route to a Fleet medical facility for a
slice and dice as the scientists tried to figure out what modifications had
been made to their systems.

Archon hauled himself upright, got a hand on the pilot’s
chair, but he was too late. The whine became a scream. Lyon closed his eyes.
This was it.

Whhhhummmp.

The pulse hit, racing through the small vessel like a tidal
wave. Lyon cursed as his cybernetic systems froze, locking him into the cage of
his own body. At his side, Archon suffered the same fate and hit the deck in an
untidy sprawl of limbs, the pilot’s chair empty and mocking. It wouldn’t have
mattered if the Gemini had reached it. As soon as the pulse hit they were done
for.

Silence fell over the small cabin, the sound of his own
breathing loud in Lyon’s ears. His eyes closed and unable to speak or contact
his team through other means, he was reduced to listening to make sure the
other two were okay. Filtering out the sound of his own breathing, he
concentrated.

There…and there. He could hear both Cael’s and Archon’s
steady breathing. Good. Although he knew better, he always worried that if
something froze their cybernetic halves, it would kill all biological function
as well, like it had with the early prototypes. They’d all heard the horror
stories, traded in the darkness of the barracks when their human masters thought
they were asleep.

Rage and frustration surged through him as he threw
everything he had at his “bonds”. Lyon was a mark-three Leo class. Running
through his body like a spider’s webs, his cybernetics were the most advanced
out there. Every system was controlled, enhanced or monitored by the central
implant in his brain. The only problem was, it had shut down at the first wave
of the EMP.

A defense mechanism, it prevented his onboard computer from
being wiped clean, an event that would render him a useless hunk of metal with
a heart, lungs and other organs piggybacked onto it. Hell, without his machine
half, he wasn’t even a full human. The defense was almost as bad as the result
and left him vulnerable, wide open to attack.

The irony hit him. He’d pitied Samara earlier for her
limited natural design and her reliance on the bio-organic systems she’d been
born with. Yet now he was a prisoner of his own advanced design. Locked into
place until the human forces boarded the shuttle much like his team had boarded
the
Valkyrie
.

Damn it, why hadn’t he realized the escape was all too easy…
That they were being set up? Twenty minutes. That’s how long it took for even
the quickest of them to do a full shutdown and reboot. Some auxiliary systems
like comms came online faster, but full operational status took twenty minutes
from shutdown. They didn’t have twenty minutes. He would guess they had ten,
tops, before the cavalry came storming through a laser-cut hole in the hull.

“Hello?”

Everything was too quiet. Slipping from the bed, Samara kept
an ear out for movement from the main area of the shuttle as she pulled her
clothes on. She winced as she pulled the leg of the coverall over her bandaged
thigh. Cael had done a good job, clean and concise. The numbness was wearing off
though, leaving her sore.

Shoving her feet into her shoes, she padded across the room.
She paused at the door, her hand on the cool metal of the frame and listened.
Silence met her ears and a sense of foreboding filled her. Unless they were
having a slumber party and it was the quietest slumber party she’d ever heard,
then something was wrong. Very wrong.

Trying to be quiet, she walked down the short corridor that
connected the back room to the main cabin. Heart hammering in her chest, she
pushed the door open and peeked around the edge, expecting Lyon to see her at
any moment and growl.

Worry and apprehension filled her. He thought she’d betrayed
him and, in a way, she had. Not willingly, she would never do that. Even though
he was a cyborg and half the people she knew would condone it—hell, most of
them would even congratulate her for trapping a whole cyborg squad—she just
wasn’t built that way.

She judged people on her own impressions, not on what the
Fleet or other people told her. She just needed to get him to believe that now.
At least she had Cael on her side, kind of, the other woman appearing to think
she was more of a threat to Lyon’s heart than anything else.